Reading the Brontë Body

BETH TORGERSON is currently an Assistant Professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, USA. The recipient of the Bechtol Lee Doctoral Fellowship, she attended King's College London, UK for a year as an affiliated research student, where she participated in their Victorian Studies graduate program. Her scholarly work has appeared in Victorian Review and Disabilities Studies Quarterly. Also a poet, her poetry has appeared in The Texas Review, Plains Song Review, as well as in several anthologies.

• Introduction 'Sick of Mankind and Their Disgusting Ways': Alcoholism, Social Reform, and Anne Brontë's Narratives of Illness Ailing Women in the Age of Cholera: Illness in Shirley Hysteria, Female Desire, and Self-Control in Villette Vampires, Ghosts, and the Disease of Dis/Possession Conclusion

"A cogently argued book...provides a unique perspective on the structure and content of the novels, and also represents a valuable historical background for any Bronte reader." - Bronte Studies "This is an important and very useful approach to the always compelling Bronte sisters, one that takes the reader back to a most important element of their lives and the lives of their fictional characters, the gendered body and its individual and cultural ills." - Gail Turley Houston, The University of New Mexico "Beth Torgerson has done an admirable job of showing, as her subtitle indicates, the constraints of culture that inflected and arguably fuelled the Bronte sisters representations of illness." - Victorian Review " ...a clearly written, well organized book" - VIJ Reviews